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Should we fundamentally reorient how America relates to the rest of the world in an era when most of our biggest challenges are global in nature and planetary in scale ? The Reinvent Foreign Policy Series will ask the questions that frequently don’t get asked among American policymakers and try to propose new kinds of solutions. It will begin with no preconceptions, except that America has made a lot of costly mistakes and needs to learn how to do better.

Georgetown’s Designing the Future(s) of the University Initiative, in collaboration with the new media startup Reinvent, is developing a series of high profile conversations that open up this discussion beyond academia. Last year, we asked leading scholars, innovators in the private sector, and working practitioners of the humanities to share their thoughts on the role the humanities can play in creating a sustainable and interconnected future. This March, we will be conducting a series of interviews at Georgetown, addressing six key topics related to the future of the humanities.

Uncharted: The Berkeley Festival of Ideas 2015 brought together 40 writers, innovators and pioneers from across disciplines to discuss big ideas in new ways. The festival took place on October 16 and 17 and featured a series of one-on-one onstage conversations that pushed the boundaries of how we conceptualize the major challenges of our time.

How can 21st-century innovation greatly accelerate progress toward the eventual eradication of nuclear weapons while significantly reducing nuclear risk today? Almost 70 years after Hiroshima, the world has managed to avoid nuclear war, but we are far from being out of danger of a nuclear explosion. Since the global community has not yet found a way to eliminate these weapons, for the foreseeable future we’re left managing both the path to disarmament and the safeguarding of existing arsenals and fissile materials.

We believe that universities should think critically about how to harness new technology to better develop their students not just as future workers, but as future citizens, problem–solvers, and leaders. The roundtables in this series tackled questions at the heart of the evolution of higher education.

In the past, audiences were expected to like whatever was delivered to them and weren’t given a say in what kind of content they wanted to see. Today, there are fewer barriers to entry for filmmakers. Though finding an audience remains as big of a challenge as ever, audiences are beginning to get more involved in the creative process. Hollywood is long overdue for fundamental change. If we could redesign the film industry into the best possible system for the artists, the audience and the business, what would it look like?

How can technology best contribute to a thriving 21st century society that works for all? Reinvent partnered with T4A.org to virtually convene innovators and experts from across the country to come up with new solutions to some of America’s most pressing challenges. We discussed how we can develop the right technological foundation in this digital age to meet those challenges and enable our entire society to thrive.

American politics is paralyzed and polarized, and many Americans worry that we aren’t moving quickly enough to rise to the many challenges of the 21st-century. This inaugural season of Reinvent America series spanned the gamut of fields that were ripe for reinvention and pulled together can-do innovators who worked in virtual roundtables on next generation ideas about how to solve our most pressing problems.